Our first day of vacation was pretty grueling. We spent pretty much the entire day (and then some) traveling.

Our first flight left Indianapolis a little after 4 pm. We had a short layover in Denver, and arrived in Las Vegas around 7:15 pm local time. From there we had to get our luggage and rental car. It turns out the Vegas airport has moved their rental car service to a separate facility several miles away, so we had to take a bus. By the time we finally had a car, got out of the rental facility, and found the interstate it was 8:30.

Our destination for the first part of our vacation was Bryce Canyon National Park in southwest Utah. We made reservations for a motel near the park for the two nights we were planning to be in the area. Unfortunately it didn’t occur to us that we would be getting in too late to make it all the way to Bryce in decent time the first night. When we eventually realized that we wouldn’t be able to make it to our hotel until after 1 am, we considered stopping early, but rather than being charged for canceling our reservation we decided to press forward.

We finally reached our hotel in Tropic, UT around 2 am (actually after 4 in the time zone we woke up in) after driving for hours through pitch-black, winding mountain roads. It actually ended up being quite an adventure. We saw dozens of whitetail mule deer very close to the road, including several large bucks. We also stopped for a while high in the mountains to look at the night sky. It was amazing. The night was cloudless and cool with no moon and the Milky Way was brighter than I’ve ever seen it. Both Elisabeth and I agreed that we had never seen so many stars.

Today we had a really enjoyable day at the National Park, but I’ll write more about that (along with some pictures) in the upcoming post on Day 2 of our vacation.